Way back in the 90s, I had an interest in angels from a lore standpoint. When I started going on Internet Relay Chat, I wanted a user name that reflected my interest but also needed one that wouldn’t be constantly in use (since you couldn’t “hold” a name on IRC). I landed on Jophiel, supposedly the name of the angel who drove Adam & Eve from the Garden, as both interesting enough to be worth using and obscure enough to usually be available when I’d log on. From there it was the usual name of my net presence and I was still using it in 1999 when I registered here.
I don’t use it for anything much new these days, both due to changing interests and because the internet is so big now that even mildly obscure stuff is usually grabbed but it’s fitting that my old legacy moniker is still on this old legacy message board.
Back in 1999, Jon Stewart had a segment on the Daily Show called “Newz 4 Kidz” where he would read letters ostensibly from children asking him to explain the news in child-friendly terms. Every time he did the segment one of the letters would be signed “love Smapdi age 8” and would be written in a sort of aggressive broken English, like “Dear Dr. Mr. Stewart; why Cuban raft boy get so many presents. WHAT THE HELL”. I had to create a new AOL account around then, and the name tickled my funny bone so I decided to use it as my screen name, but I forgot how they spelled it on the show and spelled it with a T instead of a D.
I’m named after Prince Alessan bar Valentin di Tigana, from the fantasy novel Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, which was one of my favorite books when I first signed up in the summer of 2000.
It is simple, and it is masculine. Very little gender confusion with Bullitt. I like cars, and the movie Bullitt (1968) has one of the very first and most iconic car chase scenes in the movies. I’m familiar with the San Francisco locations of that chase scene. I used to live near one part of it. And, Steve McQueen was a Marine.
I was really into the webcomic Schlock Mercenary at the time (still am, really), and have always liked Star Trek. So I picked the name of a character from the strip, Der Trihs whose name is “Red Shirt” spelled backwards (a Star Trek reference). He’s also the recruiter in the linked strip.
It was a character name in a role-playing game my brother wrote and ran a million years ago. I don’t know how he created it. I had used it as a screen name earlier on AOL and just carried it over here. I liked it for several reasons: (a) It’s ambiguous in terms of culture and identity; the name could be male or female and could reflect any number of different ethnic or national origins. (b) It’s not a common word or name so it made ego-searching easy (back when this was important to me). (c) It was amusing to hear people try to guess at the intended pronunciation.
Now it’s been long enough that I’m basically just stuck with it.
Way back in the old days when I was a lurker, there was a poster named Tater_Tot, and every time I saw one of her posts I was reminded of how much I love tater tots.
Around the same time, I had seen a Food Network show about Pat’s King of Steaks, and drove 2 hours to get one of their sandwiches and decided I love cheesesteaks too, so I made it my screen name.
In the heady, affluent days of the mid 2000s, I bought a country villa in southern Italy as a holiday home with my then girlfriend (for 80,000 euros - those were the days). When we split, we had to sell it. I still mourn the loss. It was near a town called San Vito Dei Normanni. It had 40 ancient olive trees. I still have the town listed in my weather app. It’s 39°C today.
My name, plus “map.” I’ve loved maps since I was five years old. I’d draw them (of real places and imaginary ones) through my childhood and teens; they adorn my house walls today; and I am very fortunate to always have had jobs that involve maps and/or mapping in some way.
Living and working during the decades of historical transition from mostly paper maps to mostly digital ones has been disconcerting, challenging, and fascinating. Today I will travel to a city near where I grew up with my tweener son. I wanted him to learn the geography of the city as we explore it, but a tiny phone with Google Maps (or Apple, or Bing, or OpenStreetMap) fails to give the synoptic view – so, I literally ransacked my attic until I found a suitable paper map to annotate.
So, why did I decide to use my own name? First of all, there are a myriad of “Jasmines” in the world, so I don’t feel that using just my own first name is a security risk. As far as I know, the passage of time has proven me correct. Secondly, I felt from the beginning that I wanted to be “myself” on line and not some surreal persona, and I felt that using my own name set the ground work for that.
Back in the days when unix machines ruled the internet, my .sig file (for those of you old enough and geeky enough to know what a unix .sig file is) was “Engineer, computer geek, and no-talent bum musician”. Later, when I signed up for an email name at this relatively new site called Yahoo, I wanted to get as close to that as I could, but engineer_computer_geek was too long, so I shortened it to engineer_comp_geek. I kept using that on different sites, and it’s what I used here.
“Balthazar” was already taken on Quantum Link, so I changed the spelling to “Balthisar.” No, it’s not a reference to the biblical, but to the dude on the Smurfs. If you consider when Quantum Link existed, well, then, yeah, I was young.
I felt like all the positives in my life have happened through sheer dumb luck, not because I was smart or deserving. Early in life I accidentally stumbled into being a legal secretary, rather than a receptionist or file clerk, and this has proved far more lucrative over the course of a 45 year career. When my husband lost his job in southern California, we had to move to Silicon Valley to follow the job market and we found we loved it up here and have never returned to the L.A. area, even to visit. We wouldn’t have moved to this area otherwise. There are a lot of other examples.
So I chose the name of a character who was unwittingly lucky all the time, out of Larry Niven’s Ringworld. I don’t anticipate coming to an end the way she did in Ringworld Engineers, however. And I know the character of Teela has no relation to my avatar, but I wanted an avatar that accurately represented my age.
enipla is alpine backwards. I named my first dog alpine (choc lab). She was my only companion when I bought and moved to the house I live in at very high elevation. I’m not in the Alpine zone, quite. The Alpine zone really isn’t the elevation, but the fauna. Trees I got.
I will start by saying, no I am not drunk all the time. Back in early 90’s, my girlfriend and i sign up to play games on the MS game site, and she noticed a Toast graphic for the Avatar. We worked through a few username variations, until we were able to get SoToasty. I was also able to snatch the gmail address and i have used that wherever i can.
